The Administrative Core, directed by Dr. Susan Taylor with Dr. Alexandra Newton serving as Assistant Director, will perform all of the administrative functions require by the program. To achieve this we have established a Project Manager, Grace Liu, who will work closely with Drs. Taylor and Newton, with each PI, and with each of the core leaders. This will include accounting, organization of scientific interactions, organization and coordination of monthly meetings, organization and coordination of invited speakers to the UCSD campus, organization and coordination of workshops in San Diego, and preparation of manuscripts and progress reports. She will also manage the budgets and track ordering and spending. All of the investigators are on the UCSD campus except for Dr. John Scott who has recently moved from the Vollum Institute in Portland, Oregon, to the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Washington where he holds the Edwin G. Krebs Chair. A major goal for this next granting period will be to organize biennial meetings that are held alternatively in San Diego and Seattle. There is historically a strong link between the two campuses in the area of signal transduction, and we would like to re-establish this axis. Planning an implementation of these meetings would also come under the purview of the Administrative Core. We also will have access to the San Diego Supercomputer Center and to Cal-IT2, which provide important key resources for our cores and for our bioinformatics specialist who will be funded in part from matching funds from the university. This individual will interface closely with Cores A. B. and C and will link many of the structural, biochemical, mass spectrometry and imaging components of the program. These are all data intensive endeavors. In addition, he/she will interface with other computational resources at UCSD such as the Protein Data Bank, the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NICMIR) headed by Dr. Mark Ellisman who also is the director of Core B, and the Phenotyping Core facility that is funded by NIDDK.

Public Health Relevance

Given the diversity of our team and the interdisciplinary nature of the research that we are doing it is essential to have a central coordinator for our PPG. Planning of workshops and coordination between research teams requires strong central leadership that goes beyond any one project or core. The smooth integration of all the projects and cores is a major cornerstone for our success.